There were small screws, large screws, clamps and other tools
inside each of the small, numbered boxes stacked on shelves. But
there weren’t any workers wearing orange aprons advising would-be
home improvers what to do.

The tools were, instead, destined for hospitals and surgery
centers. The workers checking the inventory and collecting the
tools needed for each spinal surgery kit were UPS employees inside
a spotless 400,000-square-foot building in Mira Loma.

UPS, the ubiquitous shipper of packages by air and land, has for
more than a decade been in the behind-the-scenes business of
storing a company’s products, keeping an inventory and shipping
those products when instructed to, whether via their own brown
trucks or a competitor’s as part of its supply-chain solutions
division.

The companies that rent space on UPS’ warehouse shelves include
well-known retailers, electronics makers and Fortune 500 companies.
They outsource their supply chain management because they don’t
have their own distribution center or in some cases want more
space.

Before Anchor Blue went out of business, the company relied on
the Mira Loma facility for five years to get its clothing shipped
to stores in two days rather than the 10 days it took the
Corona-based retailer to do it itself, said Jesse Anguiano,
operations manager for UPS in Mira Loma.

In just the past couple of months, though, the Inland facility
has ramped up its health care services, filling about 700 orders a
day for Minneapolis-based Medtronic, which employs 40,000
worldwide, according to its website.

In a separate, walled-off room, Medtronic’s employees take the
screws, clamps and other devices ordered by hospitals and retrieved
from shelves in Mira Loma by UPS employees and package them to be
shipped. The health care supplier recently closed its Corona
distribution center, where it was filling about 100 to 200 orders a
day, in contrast, Anguiano said. The company has five product
divisions being stored and shipped out of Mira Loma versus just the
one it had in Corona.

UPS opened the first building in its Mira Loma campus across
from a working dairy near Interstate 15 in 2005, making it one of
seven of the company’s strategic campuses for global distribution
worldwide. Anguiano joined UPS in 2000 when the company he was
with, Livingston Health Care in Rancho Cucamonga, was acquired.
About 277 full-time and temporary workers on the Mira Loma campus
conduct inventories and in some cases repair and test other
companies’ products and fill orders.

Of those, 30 work full time in the company’s new health care
division at the campus that opened in November.

UPS has nearly 1.2 million square feet of space in Mira Loma
with its health care customers separated from its retail clients by
a wall and security card access. Security is even tighter inside
the facility where one customer, a government agency, houses
sensitive health care-related products inside a 20,000-square-foot,
black-walled fortress with barbed wire on top.

There are tens of thousands of shelves with products as small as
a screw to as large as a vending machine that Anguiano’s employees
inventory everyday.

Third-party logistics providers are common and include the usual
shippers as well as other independent companies that fulfill orders
for their clients, allowing companies to bypass distribution
centers to get goods to their consumers more quickly in some cases,
said Bob Heaney, a supply chain management analyst with the
Aberdeen Group. If a company doesn’t have its own distribution
center near its customer base, “it might just be cheaper and
easier” to send the goods through a third-party such as UPS, he
said.

In Medtronic’s case, the company had multiple smaller
distribution centers scattered across the country and now it has
three: the facility in Mira Loma, one in New Jersey and another in
Memphis. Medtronic analyzed what it does best versus what other
companies do best, and determined that UPS has expertise in
warehousing and logistics, not to mention the Mira Loma space was
close to the shipper’s air hub at Ontario International Airport,
said spokesman Brian Henry.

The switch has allowed the company’s products to get to
hospitals faster than before.

“These are important therapies that need to get to our customers
as quickly as possible,” Henry said. “Every moment counts.”

If need be, UPS offers Express Critical shipping from the
facility, putting the package on the next flight out, not
necessarily a UPS flight.

Henry couldn’t say whether the switch would ultimately save the
company money.

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